Gift and the Unity of Being. Antonio López M.

to tend towards. The originary experience of time, instead, requires an analogical concept of being as gift.91

      The mystery of death could emerge here as an ultimate objection to time as the presence of the gift that, enriched by its past, awaits fulfillment. But to grant this objection would mean identifying the mystery of death with biological death—thus losing sight of what death reveals of the nature of gift as indicated above—and, more importantly, denying that the continual coming from another, as witnessed by originary experience, presupposes the creative call to be that is capable of begetting where before there was “nothing.” In our account, by contrast, the future is opened up by death in a far more radical way than if finite gift were its own origin or confined within a self-enclosed historical horizon. Since the present is a gift, the fulfillment of the promise is not a necessary, mechanical payment of something that is due. It is, instead, a gratuitous and overabundant gift that surpasses the exuberance even of the surprising origin of finite existence.

The unity and difference of the gift of being and time enables us to say that the distinction of past and future from the present also engages the freedom proper to the gift. The gift is asked to receive itself and the whole from the source—in this sense its past—and to welcome the fulfillment of the promise—its future. Originary experience calls for the recognition of a real, created, finite freedom that is itself (autonomous) because it is given to itself (indebted). The difference and unity of past, present, and future reveals man’s finitude as relation with the original giver, whose presence in the gift represents also the call to make the gift like itself but, pace Hegel, without denying the concrete singular gift.92 What follows attempts to ground the assertion that what constitutes the gift of the present as gift is the fact that it is in the present time that all of the gift is given, received, and awaited.

1. The first adjective is from Whitehead, Symbolism, 16. The second is from Gadamer, Truth and Method, 346ff.

2. See, for example, Wojtyła, Acting Person, 3–22. John Paul II’s reflections on the nature of human love are built upon this understanding of experience. To him, there are three original experiences: original solitude, original unity, and original nakedness. These are three inseparable dimensions of the person that have to do with the discovery of what is specifically human through one’s encounter with the world and the human other. For John Paul II, “original” is intended in the twofold sense of “in the beginning” and at the source of every human being’s daily experience (John Paul II, Theology of the Body, 146–78). See also the fine introduction of Anderson and Granados García, Called to Love.

3. Rather than approach the meaning of gift from a sociological (Mauss, Godelier, Weiner), phenomenological (Heidegger, Marion), ethical (Seneca), or deconstructionist (Derrida, Schrag) point of view, I would like to present the relation between being and gift through an examination of “human originary experience.” Incidentally, John Milbank’s reflection on gift begins with an examination of evil (see Milbank, Being Reconciled).

4. Jonas, “Toward a Philosophy,” 195. Jonas writes further: “In brief, a mutual feedback operates between science and technology; each requires and propels the other; and as matters now stand, they can only live together or must die together” (ibid., 195).

5. This approach is also proposed by Hans Urs von Balthasar and described by him as meta-anthropology. See, among others, Balthasar, GL, 5:653; Balthasar, Love Alone Is Credible. See also Bieler, “Meta-anthropology and Christology,” 129–46.

6. In this regard, the knowledge acquired through “experience” can be approximated to the classic understanding of wisdom (sapientia): the knowledge of oneself that requires acknowledging that one “does not know” and that one’s own self is comprehensible only with the relation to the divinity (Plato, Apology 23b; Plato, Alcibiades 132c–135b).

7. For further development of this, see the famous work of Jean Mouroux, L’expérience chrétienne: Introduction a une théologie (Paris: Editiones Montaignes, 1952). English translation: Christian Experience, 24. See also Ratzinger, Principles of Catholic Theology, 346–50.

8. Aristotle, Metaph. 981a15–16. For Aristotle, experience does not offer knowledge of the reasons for things; it is only science that studies the universals that can grant this knowledge: “Men of experience know that the thing is so, but do not know why; while [those who possess scientific knowledge] know the why and the cause of the facts” (ibid., 981a28–30).

9. Ibid., 980b25–981b9.

10. ST, II–II, q. 45, a. 2, c; ST, I–II, q. 26, a. 2; ST, I–II, q. 29, a. 1. This connotation of experience as the acquisition of knowledge is also found in more recent authors such as Bernard Lonergan, for whom experience has four different senses that must be properly distinguished: biological, aesthetic, intellectual, dramatic. Besides these, he also speaks of religious experience (Lonergan, Insight, 182–91).

11. Grotius, De iure belli, prolegomena 11.

12. Of course, this concept of reason and truth is only one aspect characterizing “modernity.” Robert Spaemann, for example, indicates the following as the primary aspects: understanding freedom as emancipation; the myth of necessary and endless progress; progressive mastery of nature; objectivism; homogenization of experience; hypothesizing reality; naturalistic universalism (Spaemann, “Ende der Modernität?,” 232–60).

13. Gadamer’s attempt to continue the phenomenological reflection through hermeneutics still accentuates the separation between ontology and history. See Gadamer, Truth and Method.

14. Schleiermacher, On Religion; Schleiermacher, Christian Faith, 3–128.

15. Spaemann, “Ende der Modernität?,” 240.

16. Mouroux, Christian Experience, 9–15.

17. “O man!” Gregory of Nyssa wrote, “realize what you are! Consider your royal dignity! The heavens have not been made in God’s image as you have, nor the moon, nor the sun, nor anything to be seen in creation. . . . Behold, of all that exists there is nothing that can contain your greatness” (cited in de Lubac, Drama, 20).

18. “Experience demands an I, an object, a relationship between the I and the object; but this is not enough: [these three elements are to be perceived] within an ideal horizon that colors in different ways the relation that God establishes between me and the thing. This is the mortal sin from Descartes onwards: to speak of reason forgetting that from which one extracts the concept of reason: experience. Doing this one fabricates, pre-fabricates the concept of reason and with